It’s always great to get external validation of your ideas.
So, thank you Vitalik Buterin.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how Blockchain has been so DeFi focused and the NFT craze not withstanding, what will it take to get more movement into other important areas.
In particular, if you’ve been following my white paper and other ramblings then you know I’m thinking about how we can improve communication infrastructure for Out-of-home media to let small businesses benefit from Ads and content in their location and wider community.
By the way, let me point out that I’m not anti-corporation or anti-advertising. I believe the changes I’m proposing will actually invigorate marketing and strength brand stickiness by forcing real engagement rather than lip service to customer engagement we see so much of now. More on that in a later post.
This week the auction ran for NFTs to compensate the team that implemented EIP-1559. I mentioned this briefly in Scramble Times #02, but the second I saw this I had one of those glimpses of the future you get when you stumble across something that is a real game changer. The idea of retroactively compensated a disperse team for successfully completing work that they did for the good of the community with no expectation of compensation is pretty amazing. But what makes it more amazing is that this can be put together so quickly and elegantly by making a piece of commemorative art and selling or auction it off.
And then today I watched Vitalik’s talk on YouTube from a few days ago called: “Things that matter outside of defi”
He states that there are two main reasons that DeFi dominates blockchain activity:
1) “finance has always been the area where centralization sucks the most.”
2) the fees (ie: gas prices or cost for transactions) are too high to handle lots of small transactions that might be need in many applications.
He then points out that 2) is being solved as we speak with layer 2, Eth2, etc.
Well, I’d like to say that media is also an area where centralization sucks the most. It tends to be cost prohibitive for the little guys (most TV Ads and OOH) or they are shut out completely (Ads are sold through channels that they have no access to, and no say over content) or they are forced to pay just to keep up with what competitors are doing but putting further strain on their margins (gurunavi, etc in Japan, Groupon etc in other places).
We have a plan to make this better with DeOOH. It’s something that will make the world better by helping small businesses (and big businesses) and communities to communicate more efficiently, and in other words, get more done with less effort and have more fun doing it.
Later in the talk, Vitalik went on to say that we need “retroactive public goods funding”. He was also excited by what happened with the EIP 1559 NFTs (there’s my validation) and stated that we need this to be formalized into a standard ongoing way to reward projects that turn out to be for the public good and are successful. Once you have that in place, the DeFi will take over and prediction markets will take care of the upfront funding for projects with the potential return on the back-end.
Brilliant. Couldn’t agree more.
This will change the dynamic of gathering support for a project that is more about the longer-term public good than the promise of 100x VC ROI, or the instant gratification of crowd-funding the latest tech gadget.
This is essentially what I’m trying to accomplish now with the Scramble TV NFT Bundle. The NFT viewer is something useful now, so making a special bundle with a lifetime service gives immediate and ongoing value, (hopefully) gathers a community of supporters, and is essentially a crowdfunding for the next phase of Scramble TV, moving toward DeOOH and a DAO.
I still have a lot of work cut out for me though.
I’ve spent a LOT OF TIME thinking about the gap in communication infrastructure and what it would take to fill it. We’ve already built a good chunk of it already. The world has finally caught up with our ideas too – cloud and SaaS, rule-based software that is smart in the back-end and easier to use for customers, controlling the software with a mobile phone.
However, very few people have spent much time thinking about how we communicate on location and how it could be made better with a more decentralized model, let alone how one would go about creating that.
For most people, it’s a case of, “Sure it would be great if the pieces were all in place, but I’ve got more important things to think about”
Still, the timing is better than ever for DeOOH to appear. Blockchain technology can give us the frictionless transactions we need, and the latest wave of interest in virtual worlds, now called the metaverse might provide the use case to get enough support for our ideas.
After all, if you are trying to great persistent data and identities between virtual worlds and applications, why wouldn’t you want a persistent viewport IRL to look into the metaverse?
